ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

We are the Little Folk—we!Too little to love or to hate.Leave us alone and you’ll seeHow we can drag down the State!

A Pict Song, Rudyard Kipling

Belgium has joined the list of countries that are rebelling against their elected leadership. Over the weekend the Belgian government fell over Prime Minister Charles Michel’s trip to Morocco to sign the United Nations Migration Agreement. The agreement made no distinction between legal and illegal migrants and regarded immigration as a positive phenomenon. The Belgian people apparently did not agree. Facebook registered 1,200 Belgians agreeing that the Prime Minister was a traitor. Some users expressed concern for their children’s futures, noting that Belgian democracy is dead. Others said they would get yellow vests and join the protests.

The unrest witnessed in a number of places is focused on some specific demands but it represents much broader anger. The French yellow vests initially protested against proposed increases in fuel taxes that would have affected working people dependent on transportation disproportionately. But when that demand was met by the government of President Emmanuel Macron, the demonstrations continued and even grew, suggesting that the grievances with the government were far more extensive than the issue of a single new tax. Perhaps not surprisingly, the French government is seeking for a scapegoat and is investigating “Russian interference.” The US State Department inevitably agrees, claiming that Kremlin directed websites and social media are “amplifying the conflict.”

Some commentators looking somewhat more deeply at the riots in France have even suggested that the real issue just might be regime change, that the Macron government had become so disconnected with many of the voters through both its policies and the rhetoric justifying them that it had lost its legitimacy and there was no possibility of redemption. Any change would have to be an improvement, particularly as a new regime would be particularly sensitive to the sentiments of those being governed, at least initially. One might suggest that the prevailing sentiment that a radical change in government is needed, come what may, to shake up the system might well be called the “Trump phenomenon” as that is more-or-less what happened in the United States.

The idea that republican or democratic government will eventually deteriorate into some form of tyranny is not exactly new. Thomas Jefferson advocated a new revolution every generation to keep the spirit of government accountable to the people alive.

Call it what you will – neoliberalism, neoconservatism or globalism – the new world order, as recently deceased President George H.W. Bush once labeled it, characteristically embraces a world community in which there is free trade, free movement of workers and democracy. They all sound like good things but they are authoritarian in nature, destructive of existing communities and social systems while at the same time enriching those who promote the changes. They have also been the root cause of most of the wars fought since the Second World War, wars to “liberate” people who never asked to be invaded or bombed as part of the process.

And there are, of course, major differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives in terms of how one brings about the universal nirvana, with the liberals embracing some kind of process whereby the transformation takes place because it represents what they see, perhaps cynically, as the moral high ground and is recognized as being the right thing to do. The neocons, however, seek to enforce what they define as international standards because the United States has the power to do so in a process that makes it and its allies impossible to challenge. The latter view is promoted under the phony slogan that “Democracies do not fight other democracies.”

The fact that globalists of every type consider nationalism a threat to their broader ambitions has meant that parochial or domestic interests are often disregarded or even rejected. With that in mind, and focusing on two issues – wholesale unwelcome immigration and corrupt government run by oligarchs – one might reasonably argue that large numbers of ordinary citizens now believe themselves to be both effectively disenfranchised and demonstrably poorer as rewarding work becomes harder to find and communities are destroyed through waves of both legal and illegal immigration.

In the United States, for example, most citizens now believe that the political system does not work at all while almost none think that even when it does work it operates for the well-being of all the citizens. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans no longer think of upward mobility. Projections by sociologists and economists suggest that the current generation growing up in the United States will likely be materially poorer than their parents. That angst and the desire to “do something” to make government more responsive to voters’ interests is why Donald Trump was elected president.

What has been occurring in Belgium, France, with Brexit in Britain, in the recent election in Italy, and also in the warnings coming from Eastern Europe about immigration and European Union community economic policies are driven by the same concerns that operated in America. Government itself is becoming the enemy. And let us not forget the countries that have already felt the lash and been subjected to the social engineering of Angela Merkel – Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece. All are weaker economies crushed by the one size fits all of the EURO, which eliminated the ability of some governments to manage their own economies. They and all their citizens are poorer for it.

There have been windows in history when the people have had enough abuse and so rise up in revolt. The American and French revolutions come to mind as does 1848. Perhaps we are experiencing something like that at the present time, a revolt against the pressure to conform to globalist values that have been embraced to their benefit by the elites and the establishment in much of the world. It could well become a hard fought and sometimes bloody conflict but its outcome will shape the next century. Will the people really have power in the increasingly globalized world or will it be the 1% with its government and media backing that emerges triumphant?

Macron’s concessions to the Yellow Vests has failed to appease protesters and opposition politicians, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called for “citizen’s revolution” to continue until a fair distribution of wealth is achieved.

Immediately after French President Macron declared a “social and economic state of emergency” in response to large-scale protests by members of the Yellow Vest movement, promising a range of concessions to address their grievances, left-wing opposition politician Mélenchon called on the grassroots campaign to continue their revolution next Saturday.

“I believe that Act 5 of the citizen revolution in our country will be a moment of great mobilization.”

Macron’s promise of a €100 minimum wage increase, tax-free overtime pay and end-of-year bonuses, Mélenchon argued, will not affect any “considerable part” of the French population. Yet the leader of La France Insoumise stressed that the “decision” to rise up rests with “those who are in action.”

“We expect a real redistribution of wealth,” Benoît Hamon, a former presidential candidate and the founder of the Mouvement Génération, told BFM TV, accusing Macron’s package of measures that benefit the rich.

The Socialist Party’s first secretary, Olivier Faure, also slammed Macron’s financial concessions to struggling workers, noting that his general “course has not changed.”

Although welcoming certain tax measures, Marine Le Pen, president of the National Rally (previously National Front), accused the president’s “model” of governance based on “wild globalization, financialization of the economy, unfair competition,” of failing to address the social and cultural consequences of the Yellow Vest movement.

Macron’s speech was a “great comedy,” according to Debout la France chairman, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who accused the French President of “hypocrisy.”

Yet many found Melanchon’s calls to rise up against the government unreasonable, accusing the 67-year-old opposition politician of being an “opportunist” and “populist,” who is trying to hijack the social protest movement for his own gain.

The Yellow Vest protests against pension cuts and fuel tax hikes last month were organized and kept strong via social media, without help from France’s powerful labor unions or official political parties. Some noted that such a mass mobilization of all levels of society managed to achieve unprecedented concessions from the government, which the unions failed to negotiate over the last three decades.

Some discoveries are just too shocking to digest. Recently I wrote of intrepid Ron Unz, the Californian maverick publisher and IT-genius, who dared to share with his readers his insights into the ideas and motifs of revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, as their enemies call them. But this absolutely verboten topic fades into irrelevance in comparison with his most momentous discovery that has made somewhat less resonance, paradoxically, because of its magnitude. It was too big. Dark pages of the world war history or of interracial relations in 1930s, or even the whodunit of 9/11, all that is fine and very interesting, but hardly a Stop Press kind.

His other, most significant discovery is not just Stop Press, but Burn the Press Down. He discovered and proved with hard data that Jews discriminate against you to a degree you could not even guess. While you queue at the front door of the Elites, they enter freely by the back door. Chances of a smart non-Jewish “white” American kid getting there are ten-fold lower than that of a Jew. There are ten times more smart non-Jewish white American kids than smart Jewish kids, but there are more Jewish students in the Ivy League than white non-Jews. The system is biased, and not in your favour.

Once you could work your way up to success, like Henry Ford did. That was the American Dream. Not anymore. Now the only way to the best jobs, into the American elites leads through a few top colleges of the Ivy League. You can’t bypass this funnel of opportunity. “A greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities” (all unattributed quotes are from the Unz essay). Unless you get the imprimatur of Harvard or Yale, your future is dim. Well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector for those lacking college degrees are scarce, and workers are being paid less now than forty years ago. When America’s richest 1 per cent has as much wealth as the bottom 95 per cent, it is winner takes all, and this winner is probably a Jew.

The elites have duties, too. The elite universities are supposed to pick the best boys and girls to lead America to its glory and greatness. By your own experience you already know that it does not happen; that the new US elites lead themselves to prosperity, while pushing you to poverty and perdition. The new elites failed you, failed your country, failed the world (always excepting the Jewish state). This failure is the main reason to explore how the elites produce their new generation.

The great surprise is that WASPs, the legendary descendants of the Founding Fathers, have lost their privilege, or even their fair chance to success. Unz proves that a smart Christian American boy of English or German parentage has ten times less chance to get into these crème-de-la-crème universities than an average Jewish boy. This very unfair way of forming tomorrow’s elites has been made possible by the sheer nepotistic networking of the universities’ admission offices. Clannishness, the Jews were (justifiably) accused of.

In actual words of Ron Unz, “Jews are enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance”. One thousand per cent, OMG! Provided that these Ivy League colleges are the only sure-fire way into American elites, into best jobs and into good and important positions, this biased enrolment guarantees the Jews their position of the top dog well into next generation.

In 1920s, Jews accused the WASPs of discriminating them at university admission. The WASPs kept them under 15% of admissions. Now with Jews at the top they show what real discrimination is all about. However, there is one major difference. Then, the Jews volubly complained, now the Christians do not even dare to complain.

While the White Christian Americans kept mum, the Asians dared to speak and went to court against the colleges. The colleges have been forced to explain how they admit students. The heavily-Jewish elites of the legal system and MSM allowed this case of Asian-Americans to proceed (after many years of rejection) for a good reason: they wanted to obscure this fragrant discrimination against white Gentiles by Jews by a SEP device.

In Douglas Adams’s 1982 novel Life, the Universe and Everything, (a sequel to his Hitchhiker’s Guide), the protagonist explains: a SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. SEP is the best way to hide a pink elephant in a room: people would have walked past the elephant, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

The problem of Asian-American discrimination is an excellent SEP. Indeed, as Unz said, the Asian-Americans are discriminated at Ivy League universities (though much less than ordinary Americans). But even if they are discriminated, who cares? There are not too many of them, and they anyway manage well. Thus the real point of Unz – you are discriminated! – had been hidden.

The UNZ essay is very long with its 26,000 words, too long for average reader, so here are its salient points:

Jews organized a clannish network to get themselves into best universities in numbers well beyond their share in population, and (!!!) well beyond their abilities;

their fight against discrimination of Blacks has being carried at the expense of America’s white Christians. If previously discriminated minorities, be it Afro-Americans or whatever, enjoy the fruits of affirmative action (positive discrimination), it is no loss for Jews, as only Gentiles, once privileged WASPs are being screwed up.

if once upon a time Jews had got into best colleges because they were smart, smarter than Gentile kids, now they are noticeably less smart, but they get there anyway because they are Jews.

The numbers distilled by Ron Unz out of dusty spread sheets are terrifying. You can look at the diagram he compiled, or immerse yourself in the ocean of data he provides, to get convinced: the discrimination is very real.

Unz quotes a Jewish writer who exhilarates that “the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and virtually all the major institutions of American life had by 2000 become a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard, being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict.” For a Jewish nationalist, it is a cause for celebration. For a WASP, it is a reason to regret the unwise decisions of his fathers who tried to play a fair game with Jews and were Jew’d.

But for an average American, the answer lays in the macro picture. Do the new Jewified elites manage America better than WASPs did? Are they better shepherds? Is America-2018 (with Jews getting over 25% of all seats in the express train to better future, leaving 20% or less to WASPs) better for Americans than America-1962 with 15% of Jews and 80% of WASPs in Yale and Harvard? If you belong to 1% of Americans, the answer is positive; if you are one of the 99%, it is not.

Unz is very meticulous, very cautious in his approach. He asks an almost-insulting question: perhaps the Jews are so smart (after all, that is the kin of Einstein and Freud) that their share in the Ivy League is a result of meritocratic selection? And he provides an almost-insulting answer: no, they aren’t. There are some universities that admit strictly by merit; in these universities Jews do not exactly star. Caltech, the California Institute of Technology is one of them. The Jewish presence there is quite small; Hillel, the Jewish students’ body, gives it as zero. In reality, it is about 6 per cent, like in other merit-based competitions.

It can’t be zero, for sure. In 2003, two Palestine Solidarity activists, Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf, had been booed there by pro-Israeli Jews who tried their beastly best to drive away the speakers. But there are not many Jews. There are few Jewish Olympiad winners; once they were in dozens, now there are hardly any. Altogether Jewish kids make up some six per cent of NMS, the highest-performing students’ list. This is a good result, in line with Jewish admissions into meritocratic colleges, but it is four times less than what you would expect judging by their Yale admissions. The Jewish IQ, as Unz found out, is also in line with that of their Gentile peers, and not the fabulous 110-115, as the Jewish newspapers claim. Jews are not all that smart anymore, judging by their score.

Unz explains this “sudden collapse of Jewish academic achievement” by inertia. The youngsters just do not try hard enough, in contradistinction to their fathers’ generation. They will succeed, they think, by their old-school-tie connections or through their parents’ links. Indeed when you look at the face of President Trump’s son-in-law, Mr Jared Kushner, you understand that the Nature took a nap in his generation. His parents’ generation were predators and major crooks (his father actually served two years in jail for tax evasion while obtaining his two-billion-dollar loot), but Jared’s generation could not enroll or graduate without assistance, while his political meddling made a mess of already troubled American Middle East politics.

This is the Nature way to deal with problems. Thomas Mann in his 1901 novel Buddenbrooks subtitled The Decline of a Family depicts three generations of a North German family: the first generation amasses fortune, the second maintains it, the third wastes it away in Bohemian pleasures. Smart people’s kids are usually not that smart, and have much less drive. For this reason, I wouldn’t be bothered too much by Jewish achievement of the elder generation; the young generation will waste it all right.

The problem is, there is more than one way to shine. One is to be brilliant, another is to dim others to shine in their background. In Israel, the Jews promoted plethora of laws and regulations circumcising Palestinians’ ability to compete. In the US, Jewish support of migration from underdeveloped countries and discrimination of the white American students achieve a similar effect as it lowers the average ability of non-Jewish population and allows the Jews to excel in comparison.

Unz exploration could bring enormous benefits to the American society. His diagnosis of the malady allows to cure it. In his consequent article on the subject, Unz discovered that after publication of his article, the numbers of Jewish admissions in the best colleges had been sharply readjusted downwards. What was 25% (Jews in Harvard) became 12%. But do not rejoice before time. The Jews responded with subterfuge instead of correcting action. Now they refer in their statistics only to Jews who state that they are followers of Jewish faith; and this is a dwindling lot. If one counts the students who refer to themselves as “descendants of Holocaust survivors” and speak of “my true home Israel”, we are back to 25%.

So the US Jews have learned how to perpetuate their dominance, by jealously guarding the gates of the best universities. Can it be corrected?

Jews broke the glass ceiling of admissions to Harvard by mass protests and media pressure. The Gentiles are not likely to emulate their strategy as they became even more obedient and placid as if being bred for these traits. The Americans aren’t rebellious by nature; that’s why the US is so prosperous and that’s why the lot of a working American is going from bad to worse. Yes, Scylla and Charybdis guard the passage to well-being: over-rebellious folk grows poor as revolutions diminish the treasury; on the other hand, over-docile folk grows poor because their betters oppress them fearing not for harsh response. Wise elites navigate these narrow straits cautiously like the Swedes did until 1990. Obstinate elites have to be cured by revolution, like in England or France, or by state terror, as in Russia or China.

Now you have to live with Jewified elites. Historically, the record is not encouraging. Jews are not very good in the top dog position. They are too obstinate, doctrinaire and despise the low classes to whom they feel no affinity. A single person of Jewish origin can be very good as a leader (Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian chancellor, is a good example). Some Jewish politicians are very loyal – the much-denigrated Kaganovich remained loyal to Stalin when all the rest switched to Khrushchev. But when Jews form a prominent part of elites, like it happened in a few states in different times, the result is not very good. We have the example of Israel, where the natives have nor basic rights neither citizenship, and by millions they are deprived of property and locked up in the ghetto of Gaza.

The Unz revelation demonstrates the main feature of Jews: as a rule, they are immoral (or, if you prefer, they have a different, Jewish moral, as many Rabbis claim). It gives them an advantage in some dealings but eventually courts disaster. In the Tsar’s days, the Jews complained vociferously about two things: one, Numerus Clausus, (a Jewish quota of students) and two, the Pale of Settlement, a part of the country where Jews could reside freely. They – my grandparents – sounded so sincere denouncing these evils. Nowadays, the victorious Jews established the Pale of Settlement for Gentiles in Palestine, while in the US, they fixed the low quota for previous lords of the land, and very few Jews complain about it, as I noted at length.

When it is good for Jews, it is bad for Gentiles, says the Talmud. “If you hear that Caesarea (a symbol of Gentile rule) and Jerusalem (a symbol of Jewish rule) are both in ruins or that both are flourishing peacefully, do not believe it. Believe only a report that Caesarea is in ruins and Jerusalem is flourishing or that Jerusalem is in ruins and Caesarea is flourishing”. (Talmud, Tractate Megillah 6a). History confirms it – up to a point. Jews can have it good under Gentile rule, though not as good as they would like to. But under Jewish rule, not only Gentiles, but even middle-to-low-class Jews are being screwed up, as you can observe in the Jewish state of Israel – and in the heavily Jewified US, as well. Like fire, like women, – Jews are good when under control and dangerous and destructive when they are in control.

Still, there is a free will; everyone can choose one’s own way. Nobody born in the Jewish family has to stick with Jews. The best of Jews, from Christ Apostles to Joseph Brodsky and Ron Unz always escaped it to join the people.

George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, died last Friday. President Bush was loved by the Jews. Over the weekend we saw an endless parade of Jewish individuals and organisations paying homage to Bush for his commitment to Israel and to the Jews.

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) described Bush as “a great friend of Israel, the Jewish people, and the RJC.” The group joined other Jewish voices in noting the work Bush did to help bring Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to Israel as well as his actions to help ensure the safety of Israel. Bush also led the effort in the UN to repeal the ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution and he stood up against Saddam Hussein who, at the time, was one of the last Arab leaders to oppose Israel and Zionism.

Yet, it was the photo of Bush at the Wailing Wall that grabbed my attention. On Saturday, the Israeli press circulated a photograph of the 41st president in suspiciously intimate proximity to the Wailing Wall.

We have seen variations of this photograph so many times that we have forgotten to ask the critical questions: What attracts world leaders to that wall? Is it possible that our world leaders are all (somehow) so libidinally attracted to walls that they do not even mind being caught on camera in such an intimate moment with that one particular wall? And if not, how do we explain the fact that so many of our world leaders are caught so close to that Jewish wall with their eyes closed? And more crucially, what is it about the Zionist culture that inspires this demand to publicise powerful goyim kissing the sacred wall?

Every world leader including the future British king who has visited Israel in the last decades has been photographed kissing, touching, flirting and even talking to that wall. Today I ask Why? It is likely that our incredibly lame world leaders do not understand the powerful symbolism of their visit to the wall nor do they grasp the reason they are then led to a formal ceremony at Yad Vashem. For the Israelis and Zionists, the visits to the wall and Yad Vashem are a significant affirmation of the Jewish national narrative. Both locate the Zionist project within an historical context.

Yad Vashem tells the Goyim’s leaders what happens to Jews when they do not have a safe haven. Yad Vashem reenforces the primacy of Jewish suffering and legitimises, at least in the Zionist psyche, the plunder of Palestine. The Wailing Wall is used to illustrate the Jewish ‘continuum’ in Palestine. It conveys the unfounded message that the Jews who returned to Palestine in the 20th century are the offspring of the Hebrews who lived there two centuries ago.

Israel is not the only state that integrates visits to shrines and holy places into its state’s ceremonial procedure for visitors. Islamic countries often expect world leaders to visit their great mosques. Hindus escort their guests to their shrines. People like to impress state visitors with the greatness of their heritage and the aesthetic and spiritual depth of their culture. But they do not expect world leaders to be photographed making love to their shrines or to their mosque’s walls. No other countries whether Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or Hindu expect world leaders to subscribe to or worship their local religious symbols. But the Jewish State does. It is even brazen enough to dress world leaders in Yarmulkes.

It’s probably the most important French social movement this century: the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vest protest movement. It began on 17 November, has spread throughout the country, and is due to continue this weekend. Altercations with police have already led to several deaths and dozens of injuries. Not since 1968 has there been a real threat of a mass movement taking down a French government. This is not similar to the 2016 alt-globalist Nuit debout social movement of the urban petite-bourgeoisie; this protest movement constitutes a genuine proletarian uprising.

Organized labor is largely absent from the movement. The reason for that is simple: The French Confederation of Labour (CGT) is completely co-opted by the oligarchy; it defends mass immigration; global warmism; ecologism, homosexualism and just about every over elite-power, anti-labor obsession. The CGT has become completely irrelevant to contemporary class struggle.

Leftists have almost no influence over this movement — which is a good thing! For there is no greater enemy of the working man than the petty bourgeois leftist. The protest movement resulted from President Macron’s decision to raise the tax on diesel from January 2019. The cost of fuel, rent, and utilities, coupled with rising food prices, wage stagnation, and job insecurity are making life more and more arduous for working and middle-class families. This social movement is a revolt of the French majority against the perverse policies of a tyrannical elite. Macron wants the extra money to pay for the so-called energy transition, in accordance with the exigencies of “saving the planet” from climate change. We need to address the issue of planetary salvation if we are to understand the political significance of the social movement.

Where do Marxists stand on climatology?

There are two important points to bear in mind here, considering the absence of any left-wing response to the rebellion. Leftists -and I even include Marxist-Leninists – all fanatically believe in anthropogenic global warming. Their disinterest in and outright contempt for the facts about climate is a symptom of their lack of faith in the working class. In spite of their communist posturing, they have absolutely no faith in the masses. Here’s why: anthropogenic climate change gives these failed Marxists the last hope for “socialism”: when the tsunamis inundate our cites, hellfires rage, hurricanes blow will man finally understand that capitalism simply cannot continue! Then the workers will seize power! Proletarian revolutions may have failed in the past but this time they cannot fail; this time they have Mother Nature on their side! Well, they have an excellent chance of success as they have the world’s top financiers on their side.

Maurice Strong, the UN diplomat who, with help from elite circles, pushed the global warming political ideology in the 1970s, was a cousin of the great American communist Anna Louise Strong. In 1992 Strong was chairman of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where the protocols of the 1972 Club of Rome document ‘Limits to Growth’ were developed as a global policy. In its 1991 report, The First Global Revolution, the Club of Rome stated:

‘The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill… All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.’

The notion that man is an enemy of nature is the leftist’s principle article of faith. He views the world on that basis. The theory of global warming was invented to create a consensus on global governance. Should we be surprised that the richest and most powerful people in the world, should seek to subordinate global institutions to their financial power?

French mathematician Benoît Rittaud sums up admirably the intellectual disposition which has led to widespread hysterical belief in anthropogenic global warming;

‘Now, we live in a world of postmodernity : we consider that we possess the world, but that we are unworthy of our power over it. It is this general philosophy of life, shared by so many intellectuals, that explains why the doubtful theory of anthropogenic global warming could gain so much credence. The idea that our planet is a living body, some kind of a goddess who demands repentance and sobriety, makes some climate alarmists (not all of them of course) examples of postmodern pseudoscientists.’

What we are talking about here is an inversion of Christianity. The notion of original sin is no longer the idea that we have fallen from God’s grace through disobedience to his commands but rather the belief that our sin is due to our disobedience to Mother Nature, to the Serpent in the Garden. Now that we have learned how to overcome nature, we must repent and submit to her. Global warming is a post-modern form of geolatry or nature worship.

Rittaud gives a wonderful analogy to show the danger of unproven scientific hypotheses presented as absolute truths.

One of the pioneers of American astronomy in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. He claimed that there was life on Mars and Martians had built canals there to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. According to Wikipedia:

‘He theorized that an advanced but desperate culture had built the canals to tap Mars’ polar ice caps, the last source of water on an inexorably drying planet. While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. Many astronomers could not see these markings, and few believed that they were as extensive as Lowell claimed.’

Like the global warmists, facts didn’t matter to Lowell and he bullied scientists into advocating his theories.

There is nothing like a good myth to bring people together like frantic sheep under the stewardship of a loving Shepard and that Shepard is United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (UNIPC)

But is the myth of global warming likely to last? The populist revolt says it is unlikely. So, we may hear more about UFOs, Martian invasions and the like. It won’t be hard to fool the public, once the media decide it is true. Though skeptics of the global public myth are unlikely to be treated with clemency. Liberals are already comparing global warming skeptics to ‘war criminals’.

Most Marxists believe ‘Big Capital’ is behind climate change ‘denial’. They fail to realize that it is precisely Big Capital which is behind climate change propaganda! And it doesn’t matter how well one explains that ‘inconvenient truth ‘to them, they will not hear. Global warmists tend to be about as rational as Al Qaida suicide bombers!

The Cursed Trinity

President Donald Trump is the only world leader who understands what climate change nonsense would do to the working man: It would cripple him with taxes and charges, grinding the US economy to a halt. His rejection of the Paris Climate Accord was the single most anti-imperialist act of any American president in US history. Yet leftists denounce him for it! Of course, Trump is primarily concerned with the interests of big US industrialists but that doesn’t change the fact that climate change legislation is crushing the laboring masses.

As I have said before, leftists are useful idiots of the oligarchy’s three key agendas:

1 Mass immigration and population replacement to turn human beings into capital.

2 The normalization of sexual perversion so as to break down the resistance capacities of the human individual.

3 Global warmingism which will provide the basis for a centralized global state apparatus controlling every aspect of our lives.

It’s the Cursed Trinity of the New World Order: Human capital is the Father, gender confusion is the Son and Co2 is the Diabolical Spirit. In Christianity God becomes Man; in Luciferianism God becomes Money.

The working class and the peasantry have a better class analysis than the university Marxists because they still have common sense, and are not mentally retarded by bogus philosophical theories. I am not suggesting that the protesters are aware of the fact that global warming is the most gigantic fraud in history. But there is no doubt about the fact that they understand the class basis of ecologism. Ecologism is and always has been a rich man’s game and so many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men understand that the only way to maintain their absolute domination of the masses is to wage relentless, total and constant warfare on every aspect of their lives.

As the majority of the European population are white, whiteness must be ‘diversified’. As the majority of the European population are heterosexual, sexuality must be diversified. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to hear the oligarch’s media outlets denouncing the movement as ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, and ‘homophobic’. The Gilets Jaunes movement has not highlighted race, sexuality or state-idolatry as aspects of their cause. It should also be pointed out that the movement is ethnically diverse. There are many people of North African descent among the protesters. But the fact that they represent Deep France, the silent, alienated and repressed majority of a great nation, that is what the Oligarchy fears. So, they reach for their standard tools of demonization. To borrow a phrase from sociologist Christophe Guilluy, “anti-fascism is a class weapon.”

Such terms are used by the oligarchy to demonize the decent, honest working-class men and women of Europe, who happen to have roots in this continent, who have no complex or shame about who they are; no desire to be ‘different’; no desire either to hate the other. They want their country back. As I have said over and over again, global warming ideology is the principal threat facing our planet and it is the working class and peasantry who will pay the most with exorbitant fuel and food prices. Only a deeply perverse political elite could have thought up the idea of imposing a tax on carbon — the basis of life itself!

Simply denouncing the hypocrisy of the ruling class with their private jets, four-wheel drives and opulent villas, will not make a mass movement into a revolutionary one. People need to realize that anthropogenic global warming theory is what is threatening life on this planet – not so-called fossil fuels. It is clear that many of the protesters in this movement do understand all of this, which is why the media are attacking them and complaining about the danger of ‘conspiracy theorists’ among them.

No mainstream media or fake leftists!

There have been numerous incidents where French mainstream TV have been chased away by the protesters. Meanwhile, the Trotskyists waffle on their websites with the usual fake revolutionary platitudes. The Gilets Jaunes movement is beyond left and right. However, it desperately needs leadership. Spontaneous, acephalous, social movements tend to go nowhere. What’s needed is a convergence of struggle, incorporating all the genuinely dissident movements in France.

French workers have not only figured out the conspiracy but are confronting it on the street and there is much talk of a march to the Elysée Palace this Saturday. France does not need an energy transition. It has one of the most successful nuclear industries in the world. Thanks to nuclear power, electricity costs in France are considerably lower than in Germany. Germany now produces more C02 than ever before because ecologists made it abandon nuclear. Germany is facing a major energy crisis. France will too, if it does not abandon this outrageously stupid ‘energy transition’ and renew its nuclear industry [or preferably, develop its abundant gas resources].

What France needs is a transitional government representing the interests of the majority, a government which would scrap the Paris Climate Accord and allow the public to hear what critical French scientists have to say about the global warming myth! Those scientists may be a minority today but that is only because so much of what passes for science nowadays is simply a commodity bought and paid for by finance capitalism. And there are not many courageous men out there. However, once the tables turn, the cowards will join the bandwagon and global warming theory will pass into history’s hall of intellectual shame.

To hell with minority, identity and ecological politics! It’s time for majority politics, class politics, and revolutionary politics! That is what I hear all over Paris and I suspect Macron hears it too, hence his repeated denunciations of nationalism. For, as a student of history, there is one thing he fears more than anything else: the wrath of the French nation!

Gearóid Ó Colmáin, AHT Paris correspondent, is a journalist and political analyst. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle.

Ensuring broad and stable support for carbon pricing and the phasing-out of fossil fuel subsidies requires more than addressing distributional, competitiveness and leakage impacts. A number of additional success factors can be identified (Klenert et al., 2018a) and table 6.1 provides country examples for addressing these. The challenge is particularly significant where trust in government is limited (Klenert et al., 2018a; Rafaty, 2018). And yet, where trust is strong, there is a tendency for citizens to question problems if policy solutions challenge their world views, e.g. on the State’s role in the economy (“solution aversion”) (Campbell and Kay, 2014; Cherry et al., 2017). Designing policies that are consistent with the prevailing world views of specific societal groups therefore requires extensive communication and consultation prior to implementation.

To secure popular support for carbon pricing, the public needs to be informed about its positive effect on emissions reduction targets, as well as the co-benefits of cleaner air, health and fiscal sustainability (Hsu et al., 2008; Bristow et al., 2010; Kallbekken et al., 2011; Baranzini et al., 2014; Baranzini and Carattini, 2017). Timing is also important: a gradual reform is more likely to be successful than sudden and drastic price increases. Similarly, if several fossil fuel subsidies are being reformed, this can best be done by sequencing the reforms (Beaton et al., 2013; Rentschler and Bazilian, 2017b). Language matters too, with terms such as ‘fee’ or ‘contribution’ likely to meet with popular support compared with ‘tax’ (Kallbekken et al., 2011; Drews and van den Bergh, 2016; Baranzini and Carattini, 2017).

Carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reform generate public revenues, the use of which can strongly impact support for carbon pricing. This is discussed in the section 6.3.4.

6.3.4 Use revenues from carbon pricing to foster sustainable development

Raising revenue through energy tax reforms relaxes constraints on broader fiscal policy, creating opportunities to stimulate more productive and socially inclusive economic development. With respect to carbon pricing, its potential for contributing to public budget is illustrated in figure 6.2b. In developing and emerging economies, where tax revenue-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios rarely exceed 20 percent,an additional €60/ tCO2 carbon price on top of existing measures would generate revenues worth more than 2 percent of gross domestic product(GDP). These revenues would not be available under non-fiscal climate policies like emission standards or ETS that do not auction permits.

…

Better alignment of broad tax policy can help reduce carbon emissions. Subsidies or tax deductions related to commuting (Su and DeSalvo, 2008), company cars (Harding, 2014) and the aviation sector (Gössling et al., 2017) are common in many developed countries and tend to encourage carbon-intensive transport choices. Replacing property taxes with land value taxes can reduce urban sprawl and increase housing density, which in turn reduces the need for longer commutes (Banzhaf and Lavery, 2010).

I’m horrified at the ongoing UN and green attacks on agriculture. The abundance we take for granted is politically fragile:

Fiscal policies such as ecological fiscal transfers, contingent on environmental performance, can also play a role in the land-use sector. They could be a way to implement REDD+6 when international pay-for-performance or carbon market finance flows to the national or state government level (Loft et al., 2016). There is growing experience with ecological fiscal transfers, including transfers of tax revenues to support protected areas and forests in Portugal (Santos et al., 2012), several Brazilian states (May et al., 2011) and India (Busch and Mukherjee, 2018). Land taxes on agricultural land can also help reduce agricultural land use and deforestation (Kalkuhl and Edenhofer, 2017).

For more than a week, protests have been underway across France, sparked by January’s scheduled increase in carbon taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel. These taxes are supposed to save the world from climate change by encouraging everyone to drive less.

But working folk, especially those who reside outside of urban centers, have no choice. They need to get to work, and their elderly relatives need transporting to medical appointments. As Geoff Chambers observes: “Telling a plumber or refrigerator repair man to work from home or to travel by public transport seems…a sure recipe for starting a revolution.”

It’s a strange worldview that says we should lead diminished lives today so that people in the technologically advanced future will reap the rewards. (Human history is full of doomsayers who were convinced the future would be dire, but who have been proven wrong time and again.)

There’s a poetic aspect to these protests. French law mandates reflective yellow vests in every automobile. These aren’t to be kept in the trunk/boot, but within the cabin itself. In the event of a breakdown, a vest must be donned before one exits the vehicle.

Perhaps there’s some sense in this. But as soon as something stops being a suggestion and instead becomes a law, problems arise. One wonders how politically connected the manufacturers/distributors/retailers of such vests happened to be around the time that law got passed. More importantly, individual liberty is undermined when police have an excuse to harass anyone at any time under the guise of checking for the presence of such vests.

In a marvelous flourish, the good people of France have turned this lemon into lemonade. Dressed in these vests, they’ve taken to the streets to protest. An item everyone has been forced by the government to purchase has become a powerful symbol of resistance to a government-imposed carbon tax.

Visual impact is tremendously important if one hopes to attract media attention. A good visual can mean the difference between making it onto the television news or being wholly ignored.

The photos of, and videos from, these protests are fantastic. Those yellow vests (gilets jaunes) are the cat’s meow.

LINKS:

See Geoff Chambers’ compelling exploration of the larger context of these protests here and here.

Two days ago, the UK Guardian published mini-interviews with five participants at this past weekend’s Champs-Élysées demonstration in Paris prior to things turning violent. The photo at the top of the article provides a sense of scale.

This BBC article says the fine for not having a yellow vest in one’s vehicle in France is 135 Euros – approximately 120 UK pounds, or 153 US dollars. The article also reports that these protests appear to be genuinely grassroots in nature: “In a country where protests are often tightly managed by one political party or trade union, this is a movement with no recognised national leader, no formal structure or affiliation, which unites voters of all ages from the far-left, the far-right, even those who once supported President Macron.”

There’s a huge difference between peaceful protest and violence and vandalism. People who attack police and firefighters, and who damage property, aren’t admirable – whether they’re wearing gilets jaunes or not.

As per usual in my ongoing failure to “speak to the day” as a journalist should, this piece will come out after the “most important election of our lifetimes”-midterms. Part of the delay was having to deal with friends who were worried that I would say the sorts of things I say here—because, you know, as a philosopher and retired professor the influence I have is enormous! I’ll return to the all-important midterms at the end, now that they are (safely?) behind us.

I imagine the “lifetimes” in question are those of the well-trained liberals, progressives, and “leftists” who are now in their twenties, thirties, and forties; “educated people.” For anyone older, I find it hard to understand how they think the stakes of things within the existing social system are so different than in any other election. Even for those in their forties, we have lived as adults in a time when the Supreme Court stopped an election and installed a president and vice-president in what looked like a right-wing coup. This unfolded into real elements of fascism, such as the abrogation of the U.S. constitution by the Patriot Act, the starting of wars on the basis of outright lies (lies that were easily seen through, but that were supported by Democrats in Congress such as Hillary Clinton); these wars continue today. But my liberal friends say, “never mind that, because … Trump.”

For liberals, there is nothing Trump has done that is anything but bad or even horrible. Everything Trump is and does is horrible for them.

George W. Bush is the name we associate with these never-ending wars, wars that the Democrats supported. Trump took down Bush and his terrible family with a single line that needed to be said—and yet no Democrat said it; that was a great service to both America and the rest of the world. But the Democrats are incapable of recognizing this. In fact, now they love W. and feel nostalgia for his presidency.

On day one of his administration, as promised, Donald Trump cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which had the very dangerous and wrong aim of isolating China internationally. That by itself is worth the price of admission.

In the 2016 election, every element of the ruling class and the State (and the Deep State, the crucial element of which is the CIA, at least as I understand it) supported Hillary Clinton. Leading figures in the Republican Party did everything they could to undermine Trump. The following passage from Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools, is worth not only reading, but repeated study; the passage describes Bill Kristol’s trajectory in 2015 to 2016 regarding Trump’s candidacy and election:

“I remain not pro-Trump, but I’m once again drifting into the anti-anti-Trump camp,” Kristol wrote in August 2015. “Much of the criticism of Trump has the feel of falling (fairly or unfairly) into the hobgoblin-of-small-minds category.”

Then came the South Carolina primary debate. Trump criticized the Iraq War and its promoters. Kristol erupted. He was as angry as he had been in public about anything. Kristol denounced not just Trump, but anyone who didn’t join him in denouncing Trump.

“Once upon a time we had leaders who would have expressed their outrage at such a slander,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard. “They would have explained to the American people how extraordinarily irresponsible his slander was, and would have done their best to discredit a man who could behave so irresponsibly. They would have pronounced him to be unfit to be president of the United States, and they would have mobilized their friends, supporters and admirers to ensure so appalling an eventuality didn’t come to pass.”

Suddenly Kristol found himself aligned with the cocktail partiers at Davos he once mocked. Global elites might oppose the interests of American voters, but at least they didn’t accuse Bill Kristol of lying about Iraq. Kristol lapsed into a kind of public nervous breakdown, once coming close to tears on television, as he tried to stop Trump.

He failed. Trump won the nomination, but Kristol barely took a breath. He began searching for a warm body willing to mount a third-party challenge that would guarantee Hillary Clinton’s victory in the general election. (pp.116-117; Ship of Fools, Free Press, 2018)

This fascinating tale of Kristol’s attempt to undermine Trump goes on, including the attempt to convince Mitt Romney to be the aforementioned “warm body,” i.e., patsy. It is very interesting to me, as someone who does work in Mormon Studies (especially communitarian political theory and the heterodox elements of LDS theology), that Kristol settled on Evan McMullin, a Mormon who had worked for the CIA. Unlike Romney, McMullin has actual Utah roots, and he did receive more votes there than anywhere else (where the LDS Church had denounced Trump, spurred by the famous “pussy grabber” tape). Still McMullin did not become president of Utah, either, coming in third there, behind Hillary Clinton.

Given that Trump managed to triumph even against the CIA and every other element of the State/Deep State/ruling class, I propose we call this period of the Trump candidacy and presidency an “experiment.” Liberals, and others who turn out to be no more than liberals, call it “fascism.” Some call it “right-wing populism.” Perhaps there are elements of the latter, but it is hard for me to see how terms such as “left” and “right” have much meaning anymore. Now more than ever almost everyone who uses the term “left” to describe themselves as supposedly something to the left of the Democratic Party (even if, as with Democratic Socialists of America, representing the left within the Democratic Party) has folded themselves into this wretched, ridiculous “party”—at least for “now,” when “the stakes are so high,” indeed higher than they’ve ever been, in “our lifetimes,” etc., etc., ad nauseum.

What is condemned now as “right-wing populism” is simply the populism of the working class, it is the popular discontent of working people who have continually been sold down the river by the globalist-imperialist ruling class. The Democratic Party leadership have positioned themselves to be the best servants of this class, and they’ve done a very good job with that. This is especially true in the ideological sphere, whereby anyone who disagrees with them is a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, and hater of refugees from the Third World. On this last, and the approaching “caravan,” it makes sense to me now why, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton would have supported a coup in Honduras—to drive more desperate people northward to further replace and undermine working people in the U.S. That is the sort of game the globalists play on the global chess board; more to come on this subject.

People who believe the Democratic Party ideology, or who at least believe that, at this apparently “singular moment,” “NOW” (as a close friend of mine put it), we have to set aside “ideological purity” and support the Democrats are just wrong about what is going on in the world. Like the recent class-driven/Identity Politics constituencies who pass themselves off as “feminism,” the voices of this supposed desperation about Trump are largely coming from the academic and otherwise “professional” middle-class, who identify their interests with globalism. On the one hand, from this group, I’ve seen some saying the “ideologically-pure” on the “left” supposedly “look down their noses” at those who recognize the necessity to vote for Democrats “NOW.” On the other hand, I’ve also seen the hilarious ploy of posting videos of Barack Obama asking people, “whether left or right,” to “get involved,” and vote. Let me put it this way: people who promote the latter ploy know full well that they are full of it, except perhaps it simply does not enter their minds, such are their ideological blinders and deep-seated class interests, that not everyone is going to vote the way these “involved”-types want them to. For my part, yes, if you hold a gun to my head and force me to vote, I will vote, but I am not going to vote for the party of militarism and war and spitting on working people (all the while expecting them to silently get back to work, while there is work to get back to—and otherwise bugger off), and doing no more for those whose real grievances are diverted into the Identity Politics agenda than instrumentalizing them for the power of globalist finance capital.

As for anyone who is “looking down their nose,” it is these same Democrats who have become masters of nasal ocularism*, calling the working people “stupid” and “uneducated.” Never was it more true what Marx said in the third thesis on Feuerbach, “The educator must be educated.” [*“nasal ocularism”—from the Latin, “nasi deorsum quaeritis,” op. cit. Seneca, De Brevitate Vita, c.49 CE]

In other words, I hope the Trump experiment is allowed to unfold quite a bit more.

It’s not the revolution, obviously, and it’s not the world that humanity needs, in the longer term, but it’s qualitatively better than what the Democrats have on offer.

The most straightforward version of this reasoning has to do with the recent discussion of the term “nationalism.” There is much more to be said on this question (and I will return to it elsewhere), but the point here is that Trump avowed the label in opposition to “globalism.” It seems to me that Trump meant the term in the simple sense of “take care of your own people,” and, yes, we can raise many questions about that—though, significantly, none that the Democrats have provided any good answer to (e.g., with the border issue, all they have is opposition to actually having borders, but no actual immigration policy to propose). In a somewhat more complicated vein, I think Trump means something like “protectionism” in a libertarian, non-interventionist vein. Obviously, it is completely bizarre that actual “socialist” and “communist” organizations (I’ll turn to one in a moment) could complain about trade wars and other trade policies that “threaten to destabilize world markets.” In other words, let’s defend the World Trade Organization!—after all, we’re already going down the path of defending the CIA, FBI, etc., with the Democrats. So crazy.

I recall that Alexander Cockburn once said (and perhaps the source of this can be found) that, given the choice between a libertarian anti-interventionist and a Democrat, he would take the former every time. Belief in the mythology of the mythical “free market” is not necessary to make this claim. Furthermore, though, while no one can say what will come from the Trump disruption, we have to let go of the idea that there is some connection between the internationalism that humanity needs and the globalism that the Democrats support, and the attendant view that what is “truly left” is somehow “left of the Democrats” and finding itself in what is “left in the Democratic Party.” That’s just bad reasoning that doesn’t understand the world as it is configured today.

***

Of the various things for which we can be thankful to our forty-fifth president, perhaps the most important is what we can call “the Trump Clarification.”

In actuality, this Clarification is spread out over numerous, qualitatively-different issues. I wrote about one form this Clarification takes in a previous article on the Christine Blasey Ford stunt. Trump “causes problems for the postmodern capitalism anti-politics set-up, and shakes things up. He is especially good at taking things that have needed to be addressed for years, and pushing them another step (at least rhetorically) toward crisis—and what the existing structure is showing is that, whether Democrat or Republican, the system has no solution to these things, at least not without a major shake-up and (what’s more important) without loss of power by those who are entrenched in power.”

Another form of clarification is that those to the “left” of ordinary Democratic Party liberals have had to decide where they stand. Unfortunately, they have gone full-bore into the liberalism, or neo-liberalism if you want to call it that, of the Democratic Party. In other words, so-called “progressives” and “leftists” and even “socialists” and “Marxists,” and the far-greater part of those who call themselves “feminists,” or activists concerned with “issues of race,” or Trans-activists, etc., have now folded themselves into a “politics” where the horizons are “anti-Trump,” or “because Trump,” and where, whatever they think they are intending to advance, all they will achieve, at most, is support for the Democratic Party as some kind of “alternative”—really, the only alternative. Undoubtedly, many think they are doing something else; at the same time, bedazzled by the term “fascism,” and excited by the prospect of being part of “the Resistance,” they seem to have lost all critical capacity for understanding society in a systemic and systematic way.

Whatever they think they are, these “leftists” have now shown their true colors and are simply liberals. Perhaps to capture this acquiescence of leftism into Democratic Party liberalism I can coin the term “LOL,” for the liberalism of ostensible leftists.

But I’m not laughing out loud, or in fact laughing at all. On a personal level, this has been a painful thing for me, as I have seen many comrades and friends go in this direction.

[… digression… ]

There are many indications of how unhinged and upside-down liberals and LOLs have become, but I would especially like to point to a roughly one-month period when Donald Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

The evening of the Helsinki meeting, I posted the following on my Facebook page:

Results of the past week:
Trump disrupts alliance with Europe.
Trump disrupts NATO.
Trump blasts U.S. “intelligence community.”
Trump has conversation with Putin without his many minders present.
Both establishment “parties” (“steering media for money and power,” as Habermas put it) are angry at Trump.
What’s not to like? (Just to be clear, I’m not being sarcastic.)

Predictably, many of my friends—real or Facebook-only, or somewhere in-between—jumped on this for a very simple reason: I had said positive things about Trump. Well, that can’t be allowed!

The New York Times reported, with many others following, that “Trump sheds all notions of how a president should conduct himself abroad.” When Trump expressed doubts about the U.S. “intelligence community” and its indications that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, “his words prompted rebukes from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.” One has to love this headline from the NYT: “TV anchors agape after the Trump-Putin appearance.” There were headlines regarding “universal condemnation,” and the real kicker, the president was called a “traitor.”

The latter was because, as some of my Facebook friends wrote on their pages, the president had sold out the United States to Putin and Russia. How that would actually happen is something they didn’t really consider, and neither did they reconsider their comments in the weeks after July 16 when Russian flags didn’t go up all over the country.

All of this sounded pretty good to me.

On the way to Helsinki, Trump stopped by London to see Queen Elizabeth. The news that day, June 14, was all about how Trump had supposedly committed a faux pas by stepping in front of the queen. Later it was seen clearly that the queen had told the president to walk ahead of her, but even so the reaction was how terrible it was that Trump broke royal protocol. Horrors, truly. That the president would offend the queen of England or the British Commonwealth or whatever it is at the moment, while on his way to suck up to the president of Russia, it’s just too much.

A month before, president Trump flew to Singapore to meet with the Korean leader Kim Jong Un. As every reader here knows, this was the first time a U.S. president has met with a leader of the DPRK. In the wake of the meeting, the DPRK returned to the U.S. some remains of U.S. soldiers who had died in the Korean War, and it was clear these remains had been taken care of very carefully. It was an extraordinary gesture, given the horrible war that the United States had unleashed on the people of Korea.

How anyone could see this summit meeting as anything but a good thing, I find hard to imagine. Again, as with a few other major actions by Donald Trump, I think this one is worth the price of admission.

Of course, liberals (and other LOLs) not only do not see things this way, but more, what is very important, they cannot let themselves see things this way. So, my liberal and ostensibly leftist friends say things on the order of, “Well, we don’t know how this is really going to work out.” Hmm … that’s so strange … after all, we do know how most everything else is going to work out, but, on this one thing, we can’t be too sure.

Rachel Maddow commented on the “spectacle” and the “weirdness” of the summit, saying that “we” shouldn’t “sugar coat” Trump’s having reached out to “the most repressive dictatorship on earth.” “There’s a reason why no U.S. president has agreed to give the North Korean dictatorship what they have wanted for so long.” The only “accomplishment” Maddow sees here is that Trump has bestowed “legitimacy” on the North Korean regime. (MSNBC, July 12, 2018)

That’s some really brilliant bullshit, from the Democratic Party’s paradigm of an “educated woman.”

Actually, I want to say a couple things about this “educated woman” theme from the Democratic Party leadership. This is clearly a signal to those in the professional middle-class or those who aspire to this class, but there is also something more here with this reference to “educated.”

First, “educated” here is a reference to those young people who are presently in some part of the college/university system, or who have been through this system in the last ten years or so. In other words, it’s more praise for the always-needing-of-praise middle-class Millennial generation. (And isn’t it the case when people talk about Millennials, they mean middle class, or perhaps a few scholarship students from the working class, perhaps minority students, who are taken—rightly or wrongly—to aspire to the middle class?) What, however, is the relationship between having a university degree and being “educated” these days? To put it succinctly, and I’m sorry that this is not very nice, most people receiving college degrees are not what one ought to call “educated.” The “hard” sciences, or some of them, and the humanities (or some of them), may be a little different, but, for the most part students have come out of colleges and universities for years now not having been and not having become good readers. In fact, the “trick” that so many students in recent years are trying to achieve is to get through college without reading a single book, and many of them are able to “achieve” this. Clearly this includes a great deal of today’s “educated” liberals, who, if they “know” anything, it is simply how to put certain terms in play in order to defeat the white cis-male or whatever. I’m sure those who support that model of “education” will not rest until every college is made over into the Title IX/SJW paradise that is Palo Alto University, where Christine Blasey Ford teaches.

My other comment goes more directly to the liberal talking heads such as Maddow, and public opinion they seek to generate among liberals regarding the Trump-Kim summit. Whether these talking heads are so “educated” that they cannot understand this, I do not know, but anything to do with North Korea is very significantly more to do with China. Indeed, the Korean War itself had a great deal to do with China, as did the Vietnam War and the larger war that the United States unleashed in Southeast Asia. Even for those who ever knew this in the first place, which is probably not so many these days, there is a tendency to forget that, from the moment Mao and the Communist Party of China took nationwide power in 1949, the U.S. went into overdrive to create havoc on the borders and in border regions.

So, here is president Trump attempting to consistently pursue something he said throughout his campaign, that a world in which the U.S. gets along with Russia and China is a better world, and Democrats and LOLs have put themselves in a position where they can only criticize Trump for these efforts. This is where the Democrats and other anti-Trump movement people have been since the 2016 election, but in the period from June 12 to July 16 of this past summer they really sealed themselves into this box, and it is very hard to see how they can get out of it. At the very least, they are going to need the help of people who are not so “educated.”

***

The anti-Trumpers, on the one side, and those who are at least open to the idea that there is a Trump experiment that ought to unfold a bit more, on the other, seem to live in two very different worlds. This is literally true, in some ways; here I will conclude by speaking to the outcome of the mid-term elections in terms of the divide between “rural” and “urban.”

Democrats at the presidential level have been elected or supported in recent years by mostly urban majorities in a handful of mostly northern states (with the exception of California). (Having grown up in Miami, I can also say that the urban centers of central and south Florida are also “northern” in the relevant aspects.) What this means is that, looking at things in terms of the “red” and “blue” states, presidents can be elected by a relative handful of cities. Considering a map of red and blue counties, one will see a United States that is overwhelmingly red, while the blue parts are the counties that encompass New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.

When it comes to the U.S. Congress as a whole, things work differently, as there isn’t the winner-takes-all aspect (whereby, for example, Chicago/Cook County can mostly overwhelm the rest of Illinois) and there is no Electoral College. There are still questions about how majorities (or majorities of those who vote) express themselves in the outcomes of elections, but they are different questions. Here the blue states tend to express themselves better in the House of Representatives, while the red states are better represented in the Senate. Some complain about this set-up, as the Senate is not apportioned in terms of the populations of each state, and therefore seems to be not a body reflecting majority rule.

However, let us interrupt this little Civics class for a moment to remind ourselves that there is nothing in the U.S. system, at least at the national level, that is really representative of “the people” in any substantive sense. We can simply cite president Jimmy Carter, Nobel Prize winner, committed Christian, greatest Democrat alive (according to Democrats, I mean), and almost certainly one of only two or three U.S. presidents who is not/was not a pussy grabber (along with Abraham Lincoln, probably the greatest president, who was gay), and who, as the head of an effort to certify elections in various countries as “free, fair, and open,” has spoken to the oligarchic nature of the U.S. system. Someone praised by Lincoln, namely Karl Marx, proclaimed that every class society is a “dictatorship” in the following way: a capitalist society is a society ruled by capital. This means that, albeit in complicated, often messy ways, capital decides—unless some countervailing force forces things in another direction. There is ample historical experience to show that electoral “politics” is not a real countervailing force. In a way, it is the number one task of the Democratic Party to convince people otherwise, despite the fact that no so-called “democracy” (or “democratic republic”) has been bought and paid for to the extent that the United States has been—and that is not even to get into the basis (in slavery, indentured servitude, genocide of the existing indigenous population, and general dispossession of the great majority) for what was called a “revolution” in 1776. (Despite this, I do not agree, or at least not entirely, with most European Marxists, e.g. some of my favorites such as Sartre, Adorno, and Badiou, that there was nothing at all good in the American Revolution.) So that’s the Civics class none of us got back in the day, and of course there is a great deal of complexity left out here.

What is Donald Trump in all this? I’ve proposed three terms: experiment, clarification, and disruption. In the aforementioned “all this,” I think the third of these terms is most important. Trump disrupted the Republican Party in very significant ways on his way to the nomination. That disruption did not necessarily have to be a good thing, in any larger terms—but, in fact, it was a good thing. Because it is a delicious passage that ought to make any person with good will toward humanity happy, I will quote again from Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools:

It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

This was the moment when Jeb Bush and the whole Bush family was done for, and how can anyone in the liberal/left camp not be happy about that? And Jeb helped nicely with his whining, “I’m tired of people attacking my brother and my family.” Yes, wonderful crime family there! –or, crime plus CIA, which is pretty much how the latter always works. Just like that, too, Jeb’s 100+ million dollars spent on the campaign went down the toilet. But let’s stay with Carlson a bit more:

Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts [were they agape?] declared the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out. …

Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.

Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. [This is where the Bill Kristol narrative picks up.] They hated him for that. (My emphasis; pp.108-109.)

As I said in “The Christine Blasey Ford episode,” you know it’s a different, topsy-turvy world when Tucker Carlson is making far more sense than the “left.” But then, I suppose it’s a topsy-turvy world when the First Lady is from the same country as Slavoj Zizek!

And consider again the fact that the LOLs had been saying for years that they were “frustrated” that Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton, did not go after G.W. Bush on the Iraq War and what led up to it. HRC is of course a hawk, she is all about war and militarism; but even if she wasn’t so hawkish, she is also all about the game of “politics” as it is supposed to be played. When Trump showed very bad etiquette in that debate, he really broke with the entire political establishment, and made them all look like the craven, lying power-players they are.

Couldn’t a good argument be made, on the basis of Trump’s apostasy, and on the basis of my Marx 101 Civics-class presentation, and on the basis of the reactionary etiquette of all acceptable establishment politicians of either establishment party (in the complete bullshit “two-party system,” that we all learned about in Civics class), that Trump’s election was the closest thing to a triumph for democracy that could possibly happen in the United States?

Obviously, Trump is not the international proletariat, but is he in some way representing something of the working class? Ironically, the LOLs themselves think this—except that what Trump represents is the “stupid, fascist, racist, white, male workers” of the “rural” parts of the U.S. Of course the “male” part is definitely not true, part of why HRC lost is that the majority of white women, and many other women, did not vote for her.

What exactly are the “rural” parts of the United States? As I suggest above, referring to the blue/red map of counties rather than states, “rural America” is now everything that is outside of a handful of large and relatively large cities. (Having lived in Shanghai and Mexico City in recent years, my perception of what is a relatively large city has been altered a good deal. But what I’m really talking about is the famous New Yorker cartoon on the New Yorker’s view of the United States.) In some sense there are very few parts of the United States that are “rural” anymore. There are cars, roads, highways, electricity, and television; even more, now, there is the internet. The latter is working well as a force of globalist homogenization.

Two things that larger cities bring is more “diversity” and more “culture.” The second of these is not at all available to everyone, and certainly not equally, but still, it seems like a good thing.

“Diversity” is universally praised as good, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that, and one way to see this is in the class structures of cities. Of course all my liberal, academic friends “love the diversity” of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. For them it is like a smorgasbord of experiences that they can have, and then they go home to relative comfort. Of course they are “around” ethnic Mexicans quite a lot, boys and girls and men and women who work in restaurants (not just Mexican restaurants), generally in the back, and sometimes as caregivers. In universities there are non-white students who either come from better-off families or who have been provided with financial aid in the hope that they can join the middle class in a very assimilated, middle-class way. Some of these students succeed, while many quietly slip away. How much longer even this experiment will go on is uncertain, as even for middle-class whites the “college experience” is becoming untenable. The term that cannot be brought into the “diversity” parade is indeed class, because urban diversity on the whole depends on a great deal of class inequality, and situations where, on the whole, after one has one’s exciting “diversity”-interactions for the day, one can retreat to a different kind of space. Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider the meme that went around recently, featuring mega-pop star Katy Perry. As part of the “resistance” to Trump on the border question, she preaches, “The greatest thing we can do is unite and just love on each other. No barriers, no borders, we all just need to coexist.” And yet Perry “lives in a very-large, nineteen-million dollar mansion, hidden at the end of a private drive in a gated community surrounded by security.” Many of the leading Democratic politicians have similar set-ups.

One of the things that happens in the “rural” part of American, which includes medium-sized cities and towns in states as diverse as Ohio and Iowa and Kansas and Wyoming and—well, really, most of the states (and much of Canada!) is that “diversity” is not just the fun mixing of cultures and colors that liberal academics celebrate. Instead it is the supplanting of a longstanding culture by a new population of non-union workers who have been brought in by what are more or less legal “human traffickers”—except these traffickers don’t work for some penny-ante operation (though, at the ground level, they may live like prison guards, not so much better-off than prisoners), they ultimately work for globalized finance capital. This is not a fun scene, for anyone, really—but all the LOLs can do is complain that the “rural, white” people don’t want or like “diversity.”

There is a good deal more to say about this question, but once again I’ll put in a plug for Ship of Fools; see Ch. 5, “The diversity diversion.” There’s more to say than what Carlson says, too, but in any case, much of what he says is on a topic that has been ruled out of order by academic liberals and, what is so vastly crazy I would find it hard to wrap my head around it if I hadn’t come through that scene myself, academic leftists and Marxists—namely, the topic of class.

But I’m sure all these good folks would want to talk about class if only the workers (or the “white workers”) weren’t so stupid, racist, misogynist (even the women, obviously), and fascist. You see, they’ve ruled themselves out of consideration. We are back with the crude dismissal of the working class by Bertrand Russell and other aristocratic, Fabian socialists. Russell, in his sweeping, generalized characterization of Marxism, claimed that Marx and Marxists thought that the working class should rule society because they are some sort of morally-superior class. Perhaps Russell was unconsciously reflecting on his own superior attitudes (Russell was not so “open” as to accept his gay son, for example, and the poor young man fell into insanity), but, in any case, despite the fact that very few working-class people could even begin to get up to the debaucheries perpetrated by the ruling class (no one can afford these things, if nothing else), Marx’s argument is something quite different, it has to do with the social structure.

As I said above, that even Maoists and so many others who have called themselves “Marxists” down through the decades could now buy into this nonsense, if from the “other side” (working people, or the “white working class,” is morally-inferior), as it were, is a disaster of epic proportions, right up there with LOLs loving the CIA, FBI, Mueller, George W. Bush, John McCain, etc.

There’s a good side to this, though. It shouldn’t be so hard to break with all of this horrible crap, and in fact most “ordinary people,” especially “ordinary working people,” aren’t having such a hard time breaking with it. And whether or not Trump truly represents these people, he does seem to be an alternative to the horrible crap that the Democratic Party proudly represents.

And you know what they’re going to say: something about the rural, white, working class being fascist, etc. And something about me being a fascist or fascist sympathizer, etc.

In my CounterPunch.org articles, I’ve tried to say some structural things about capitalism, imperialism, globalism, and postmodern capitalism, and the specifically-American context for why I not only don’t think Trump is a fascist, but also why I don’t think real fascism will work in America. One very major reason is that a fascist society is a highly-militarized and politicized (in a particular ideological way) society, and, for all kinds of reasons such a society is not in the offing here. These reasons range from consumerism (don’t stop going to the mall just because of 9/11 and the Patriot Act) and the warped view of what freedom is in a consumerist society, to the recent announcement of the “Space Force.” The “Space Force” is something that was coming for some time now, and it will be coming regardless of who is president—and one reason for this is that the U.S. cannot hope to mobilize the numbers of people it would take to actually “win” a long-term war in, say, Iran—it cannot even do this in Iraq or Afghanistan. (See chapters 9 and 10 of George Friedman, The Next Hundred Years [2010], for a very plausible scenario on the Space Force; most likely this will grow out of what most people do not realize is the “other space program,” namely the U.S. Air Force.) On the other hand, this mechanization-robotization-cyberization of space is mixed up with a gaggle of other issues, including immigration (let people in to become cannon fodder) and a military system that is, in effect, just as much a welfare system as anything else.

Certainly there are “Orwellian,” or “Vonnegut-ian” aspects to all this (see the latter’s Player Piano on the “Reeks and Wrecks”), but these don’t add up to fascism, and indeed these sorts of things work better in a system of global “markets,” especially where the working people are treated like excremental beings who are the worst kind of people, who need to shut up and check their privilege, curb their racist and misogynist anger, and get back to work, if they have work, and otherwise bugger off.

That’s the message our LOLs have for working people, who they think they can carve into sections by race, etc.—and capitalism especially in its eighteenth to twentieth-century forms, and in new forms employing Identity Politics today, has done an exemplary job with this carving. Let’s go back for a moment to Max Horkeimer’s famous line that, “If you’re not going to talk about capitalism, shut up about fascism.” Somehow it has escaped today’s LOLs, most significantly the avowedly-leftist (and even “Marxist”) side of this bunch that they go on about Trump being a capitalist (and he is, but let’s also think structurally about some of the divisions among the capitalists), but they have put themselves in a position where all they can do is affirm the gigantic forces of capitalism in the United States and the world, with its leading edge of finance capital.

Obviously this is very complicated stuff. The point here, though, is that in pursuing this “fascism” thesis (though to call it a “thesis” is to give too much credit to it), these LOLs have suckered themselves into supporting the main workings of capital in the world today—and, from this, nothing good will come, and much that is bad.

So, what would actually be good is to stop blaming working people for having figured this out—even if not in the heavily “theorized” way that some academics might prefer.

The irony here is that, in this age where the left is wrapped-up in Identity Politics, there’s not a lot of good “theoretical” work going around, things have mostly been reduced to a jargon that is good for little more than name-calling and call-out culture.

It is hard to expect that things will go in a better way for the existing Left. They’ve dumbed themselves down too far. (In terms of philosophy and what came to be called “theory”—based in literary theory and giving rise to “cultural studies”—I do blame some of this dumbing down on the more recent outcomes of phenomenology and hermeneutics, with not enough structuralism.) They’ve attached themselves too thoroughly to power as the be-all of everything. (It has to be recognized that some of this comes out of utilitarian and Hobbesian aspects of Marx, and the Machiavellian aspects of Lenin—and the failure to grapple with the ways in which Mao and others provided a corrective to this.) Their self-conception (and this goes for liberals in general) as so bloody smart is bound up with the idea that most ordinary people are stupid.

It is hard to imagine that this LOL/LARP “resistance” can go much further, or that it could have gone as far as it has, for that matter, without some major, if hidden, backing.

All this went around a major bend with the Month I discussed. Another bend was traversed with the Christine Blasey Ford and Elizabeth Warren stunts, though at that point the LOLs were moving at breakneck speed toward the mid-terms, only taking time out to blame Trump for the (fake) pipe bombs and the murder of eleven Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The pipe-bomb suspect looks very suspicious, not like someone who could have pulled off what he is charged with doing; the person charged with the synagogue murders was angry that Trump is not an anti-Semite. Trump made strong statements in both cases, but of course all of that just became fodder for the Democrats on the way to the mid-terms.

Now we have some results.

I will say, and perhaps this will make my liberal friends a little happy, that I’m not sorry that certain Republicans lost their elections. In my home state of Kansas, I’m not sorry that the Republican lost the race for governor. It’s good that people here have had enough of Brownback-ism, and more or less any Republican candidate for governor in Kansas is going to be in the pocket of the Koch brothers. Similarly, it’s of course good that Scott Walker has been booted out in Wisconsin. There are a few more examples like that around the country where I’m not only not sorry the Republican lost, but that the Democrat won.

In terms of the Trump experiment, I can see some possibility for something good coming out of the Democratic retake of the House. One would think that the Democrats will now have to actually make concrete proposals on immigration rather than just blather ideological baloney that amounts in reality to there not being any borders. (Again, here, there are all kinds of complexities to questions of immigration and borders that the supposedly-benign view of immigration espoused by LOLs papers over.) They might actually have to take responsibility for something, for a change. As I’ve said before, there is almost a “situationist” (in the sense of Guy Debord) aspect to the way that Trump pushes “maximal” solutions in order to at least thematize the need for some solution. Perhaps here, too, we see that what is especially disruptive about Trump is that, while he is “of” the world of capitalism and the capitalist economic and “political” system, he is not entirely “in” it.

Now, compare this with what is entirely “in” this latter world, and who would not have things any other way … in other words, the Democratic Party, and all who would give aid and comfort to it.

And so, are the Democrats actually gearing up to propose solutions to these problems that have been thematized (sometimes in a forced and perhaps “extreme” way) by president Trump? No, of course not. For one thing, immediately after the midterms (even with ballots still being counted and contested in some states), the Democrats have a new hero: Jeff Sessions! They are holding new demonstrations: Protect the Mueller investigation!

Let’s note that the Democrats themselves do not officially use the term “fascism” when talking about Trump—that is instead the ostensible Marxists, including my former comrades of the formerly Maoist RCP. The latter cite the definition of fascism formulated in 1935 by the Comintern leader, Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov based himself on Lenin and argued that fascism is the open dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital. This describes the Democrats nicely, especially insomuch as they wrap this dictatorship up in SJW and Identity Politics rhetoric.

What leading Democrats have said in the wake of the midterms (only a few days ago, now) is that their concentration will be on more investigations of Trump, support for the Mueller investigation (including what no special prosecutor has had or is supposed to have, complete carte blanche to look into anything and everything—other than, one supposes, things like the installation of a fascist regime in the Ukraine by Obama’s and Clinton’s State Department), and attempts to impeach Trump. But hey, there are good reasons for this: 1) the Democrats know they have no alternative on the immigration/border situation, and neither do they want one, because their main aim is to undermine the working people of the U.S. for the benefit of globalist finance capital; 2) especially these newer, younger Democrats, these “fresh faces” that my liberal friends are so excited about, have never gotten down to any kind of real work other than SJW activism, and this latter kind of “work” mainly consists in name-calling to bring people down. On this latter point, let’s not forget that Identity Politics inevitably divides against itself; it would not be surprising if we are about to see a sectarianism that makes previous left sectarianisms look like a hippie drum circle.

***

Remember the very simple message that Trump had for potential African-American voters in 2016? “What do you have to lose?” Understood as a constituency, and an “identity,” things were a little more complicated than that. But perhaps the eight-percent of African-Americans who voted for Trump understood well enough that it was worth taking a chance, when the Democrats treated them as chumps. (Significantly, that eight-percent consisted in four-percent women, thirteen-percent men.) Whether African-American unemployment is down as much as Trump says, or as little as the Democrats say, it seems clear that at least it is down.

When it comes to the thematization of the “rural” and of working people—which more or less comes to the same thing, and neither is it some racially monolithic group, either (as Trump has continually thematized in speeches that brilliant liberals can only hear as something from the Nuremburg rallies)—Trump is at least bringing forward issues that do not exist in any positive or constructive way for the LOLs. This deserves credit, because, whether or not Trump is really for the working people, at least he is not the sworn enemy of working people, at least he does not openly express contempt for working people.

But I frankly think the Trump experiment, disruption, and clarification opens up much more than that for the ordinary working people, of all colors, genders, and sexualities of the United States, and one can at least hope that opportunities are opened up for ordinary people of other countries if the United States can get out of their business. (I will say more about this in a subsequent article, which at the moment I hope to title something like, “From Maoist to Trumpist? Encountering today’s “left.”)

So, to my many liberal or effectively-liberal friends who say that “revolution is not in the offing” and there is some sort of qualitative difference between normally-functioning bourgeois democracy and what Trump is and represents, and so I have to choose, my response is:

Laissez l’experience rouler!

Bill Martinis professor of philosophy emeritus from DePaul University. He is aiming to go from retired professor to renewed philosopher, and also to devote a good deal of time to making music. After twenty-eight years in Chicago, he now lives full-time in Salina, Kansas. His most recent book isEthical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. He has now released four albums of experimental music in his “Avant-Bass” series, most recently Raga Chaturanga (Avant-Bass 3) and Emptiness, Garden: String Quartets (Avant-Bass 4).

Hamilton Gregory | April 29, 2016

A presentation and reading by Hamilton Gregory, author of “McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam.”

Because so many college students were avoiding military service during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered mental standards to induct 354,000 low-IQ men. Their death toll in combat was appalling.

I think it is not a clever move for leftist Jewish groups to declare that Trump is to blame for the terror attack in Pittsburgh. In fact, some might see it as irresponsible, and a response that could easily provoke further harassment and violence.

Most disturbing to me about the Jewish progressives’ response to Trump’s visit was the blunt dishonesty reflected in the signs and announcements of the protestors and organisers.

According to the Forward one sign read, “you know who else was a nationalist? Hitler.” Hitler was indeed a nationalist but so was Churchill, Gandhi, Herzl and even the 52% of the Brits who voted for Brexit. Nationalism isn’t the problem: Racism is. Accordingly, we tend to believe that it was racism that drove Hitler’s discriminatory ideology. But the ‘progressive’ Jewish groups who opposed Trump this week aren’t free of racism. They themselves are operating as racially exclusive political groups. I have said it many times before. I struggle to see a categorical difference between Aryans only and Jews only clubs. To me, both are equally racist.

“Speakers from Bend the Arc, the progressive Jewish group that organised the march, castigated Trump and what they saw as his complicity in the attack, allegedly perpetrated by an anti-Semite who shared Trump’s anti-refugee views.” It is comforting to learn that Jewish progressives support some refugees; do they also support the Palestinian refugees? Israel has prevented the ethnically cleansed Palestinians from returning to their land for more than 70 years. The Jewish State’s record on refugees and asylum seekers is appalling. But it seems the progressive Jews at Bend the Arc have little to say about that. I searched Bend the Arc’s web site and didn’t find any denouncements of the Jewish State’s anti refugee policies. Maybe in the Jewish progressive universe one rule applies to the Jewish State and another rule to the sea of Goyim.

Noticeably, the Bend the Arc event was not the only protest in town: A previous rally event had been held nearby, organized by the leftist Jewish group IfNotNow in collaboration with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other groups.

“We know Trump is responsible for violence in our city,” IfNotNow and DSA organizer Arielle Cohen told the Forward. “Trump has been the enabler-in-chief.” I fail to see the evidence that supports Cohen’s strongly worded accusations. And I wonder whether the decision makers at IfNotNow and JVP grasp the danger they may inflict on their communities by making such provocative accusations.

It is interesting to contrast this reaction to that of the members of the African American congregation that was targeted in 2015 by Dylann Roof, a self-professed racist shooter, who killed 9 people who had invited him into their bible study. After the shooting, Mr. Roof was unrepentant but the reaction of the victims and their families contrasts sharply with the progressive reaction to the Pittsburgh massacre.

At Mr. Roof’s bond hearing, the victim’s relatives spoke directly to Roof. “You took something very precious from me” Nadine Collier, the daughter of Ethel Lance said. “But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”

“I acknowledge that I am very angry,” said the sister of DePayne Middleton-Doctor. “But one thing that DePayne … taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray God on your soul.”

Each speaker offered Roof forgiveness and said they were praying for his soul, even as they described the pain of their losses. Not one speaker blamed political leaders or anti Black sentiment. They correctly saw Roof as the culprit, even as they compassionately prayed for him. There is much to admire in the congregation’s reaction. It was the opposite of inflammatory, intended to calm the situation.

If the goal is to unite America, to bridge the divide and calm things down, probably equating your president with Hitler and accusing him of the hate crimes of others is the worst possible path to choose.

In Chicago, a low but persistent rumbling is heard these days, especially on the South Side. It is Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect and the planner of what would become the city’s Jackson Park, turning in his grave and muttering Victorian imprecations against Barack Obama and his eponymous foundation.

Why? Before we get to that, let’s see what Olmsted wrote back in 1871 (the year of the Great Chicago Fire), when Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore and other southern lakefront precincts – what would now be classified as inner-city neighborhoods – were still remote, barely settled suburbs of a fast-growing city:

There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity, and that, the lake, can be made by artificial means no more grand or sublime. By no practical elevation of artificial hills, that is to say, would the impression of the observer in overlooking it be made more profound. The lake may, indeed, be accepted as fully compensating for the absence of sublime or picturesque elevations of land.

There are three elements of scenery however, which must be regarded as indispensable to a fine park to be formed on your site, the first being turf, the second foliage, the third still water. For each of these you are bound, at the outset, to make the best of your opportunities, because if you do not, posterity will be likely to lay waste to what you have done, in order to prepare something better.

Prophetic words. The Obama Foundation, together with city government and the University of Chicago, is now indeed laying waste to one of Olmsted’s major urban landscaping accomplishments, and not in order to replace it with something better.

If Obama, the U. of C. and City Hall have their way, a large chunk – two square blocks, to be exact – of Jackson Park, one of the jewels of Chicago’s 19th century park and boulevard system, will be repurposed, denuded and rendered unrecognizable. If the deal goes through as planned, the private and unaccountable Obama Foundation will be allowed to lease 19.3 acres of prime lakefront land forever for the grand total of one dollar. This stolen public space will house the Obama non-Library, formally dubbed the Obama Presidential Center. (Breaking news: On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council unanimously approved the deal transferring control of the parkland to the Obama Foundation and committing the city to costly “road and pedestrian improvements.” The foundation plans to break ground in 2019, pending federal approval and resolution of lawsuits filed by park protectors, as described below.)

The centerpiece of the OPC, hereafter referred to as the Great Tower of Nothing, is a 235-high foot high structure (that’s 50 feet taller than Rockefeller Chapel, the reigning monument to money and ego in Hyde Park) that is as cold and ugly as avarice itself. Although originally marketed as a presidential archive, the huge and handsomely endowed OPC will house no papers or artifacts of the Obama administration and, for reasons not fully elucidated, will have no connection to the National Archives and Records Administration. The actual presidential papers will be stored, at least temporarily, in an abandoned furniture store in a distant and uninviting suburb of Chicago, which apparently will not be open to the public.

The bunker-like edifice, towering over a newly enlarged golf course, will instead serve the Obama Foundation as “an ongoing project where we will shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21stcentury.” It is becoming abundantly clear that in the Age of Trump, useful citizenship training will center on theory and practice of civil disobedience and mass resistance. But this is not the sort of “ongoing project” the Obama Foundation seems to have in mind. There is talk about “cultivating the next generation of leaders,” which suggests a long-term goal of using corporate largesse to churn out more triangulating Wall Street Democrats in the Clinton-Obama mold. To skeptics, it is not readily apparent how this content-free non-library, really just a big clubhouse sheltering the vaguely purposed foundation and fundraising apparatus of an ex-president who rarely speaks up on public issues, will secure our rights and liberties in an era of encroaching fascism.

Aware perhaps of the project’s political and historical irrelevance, the Obama Foundation insists that the Great Tower of Nothing will bring new life and energy to a comatose neighborhood. The OPC be a “new landmark for the Southside and an economic engine for the city of Chicago, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, creating thousands of jobs – and will help to continue the revitalization of historic Jackson Park.”

These claims are typical pie-in-the-sky developer talk. Yes, the Obama un-library may well turn out to be an engine of development, but not in a way that will benefit the 99 percent. Quite the contrary, as we will see. And as for redeveloping Jackson Park: “No matter how they describe it, they’re taking away parkland,” says the redoubtable Herb Caplan, whose tiny Protect Our Parks group is suing to stop construction of the project, charging that it’s an “institutional bait-and-switch” designed to privatize the commons. This sets a terrible precedent for Chicago’s public lakefront, which by a city mandate going way back to 1836 is pledged “to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.”

So what is the underlying purpose of this over-scaled, oddly empty complex, which may end up costing as much as $1.5 billion to build and endow, all to convert a rare spot of green in an under-parked city into yet another heavily trafficked, highly paved, tightly controlled space? I think it’s pretty clear, if you look at the players, history and trends. It’s all about gentrification, i.e., ethnic cleansing, which is already taking place in Chicago at a pace never before seen.

I contend that the plutocrat-funded Obama Foundation and Presidential Center play the same role in the long-term transformation of the city’s southern lakefront that the Obama presidency did in American politics: that of putting a faux-progressive smiley face on the ugly underlying realities of institutionalized inequality, capitalist skullduggery and white privilege. As others have noted, this white elephant on the lake is actually a Trojan horse, using understandable but misplaced racial pride and identity politics and a fuzzy do-gooder mission statement to mask a real estate scheme that is all about neighborhood flipping and displacement of the poor.

A little historical context will help clarify things. In 1980 – about when Harold Washington was contemplating his historic mayoral run – Chicago’s black population peaked at nearly 1.2 million. The Urban Institute estimates that by 2030, that number will drop to 665,000 – an astonishing 45 percent decline over 50 years. According to journalist and researcher Alden Loury, “The restrictive covenants, red lining and white flight of yesterday have been replaced by stiff resistance to affordable housing, high-cost housing that effectively prices out some people of color, and disinvestment in communities of color regardless of their economic heft.” The result is that the 20thcentury’s Great Migration of African-Americans from the South has become the 21stcentury’s Great Exodus from Chicago, a shift in direction driven by the same virulent, undying racism.

The University of Chicago, which engineered the Jackson Park non-library bid, is the institutional driving force of the Great Tower of Nothing. The University, which used federal urban renewal (or as James Baldwin liked to say, “Negro removal”) funds to boot thousands of mostly minority families out of Hyde Park and nearby Kenwood during the 1960s, no doubt sees the Jackson Park complex as an outpost of its own campus, projecting its identity southward and creating a larger buffer zone for its intensively policed, bubble-like neighborhood. It also serves to reinforce the university’s deep and marketable connection to the Obamas (Barack taught at the law school; Michelle had an executive position at the medical school) and to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party they personify. But there is more at stake here: Since the OPC project was launched, the U. of C. has announced its intentions of building a 1,200-bed student housing complex nearby, as well as a “boutique hotel.” These ventures would be an unthinkable risk for the cautious institution were it not for the billionaire-funded and city-subsidized boondoggle anchoring the site.

It’s all about property values, tax revenues and “desirable” demographics. Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s one-time chief of staff and currently Chicago’s notorious Mayor One Percent, speaks no other language. But what does Obama, Rahm’s old boss and staunch friend, say about all this?

At a community meeting this past winter, Obama commented: “We’ve got such a long way to go in terms of economic development before you’re even going to start seeing the prospect of significant gentrification. Malia’s kids might have to worry about that.”

If you can get past the dripping condescension of that remark, you encounter its Trump-like disingenuousness. Gentrification has long since begun oozing south of the Midway, the wide boulevard that once formed the university’s southern border. Woodlawn, south of Hyde Park, was declared the third hottest neighborhood in the nation for the first half of 2017, with median housing values rising 18% in that time, according to the City Lab website.

If it wished to, the Obama Foundation could make a strong statement regarding the evils of gentrification and displacement. But that’s not what the Foundation is about.

What it is about is raising money, great gobs of cash, principally by tapping the obscenely rich. In 2017, the Obama Foundation solicited no less than $232.6 million. Million-dollar donations have come from such checkered sources as financier Ken Griffin (Illinois’ richest man, who also gave $20 million to the campaign of Bruce Rauner, the state’s reactionary Republican governor), Goldman Sachs, Bill Gates and George Lucas – whose own attempt to blot the lakefront with a monument to self only recently went down to defeat, as I hope this one does too.

Why the super-wealthy are so eager to contribute to a paper-free “library” and artifact-free “museum” in a part of Chicago they are unlikely to visit is a question that invites speculation. One possible answer is that Obama is redeeming his chits from eight years of meritorious service to the ruling class, including his unstinting if unsuccessful devotion to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an arrangement that would have transferred huge amounts of what was once quaintly known as national sovereignty to our transnational corporate overlords. It was just about the only piece of legislation that Obama was willing to get on the mat and fight for. No wonder he’s expecting and receiving concrete manifestations of gratitude, especially from the tycoons who went unindicted and fully bonused-up after the 2008 meltdown, winding up bigger and stronger and more arrogant than ever.

What we do know is what the oligarchs paying the bills don’t want or like. This includes attacks on the economic and political forces of gentrification, which they view as progress, or advocacy for affordable housing, or acknowledgment of systemic inequality and injustice, or demands for radical change on behalf of – among others – the many poor and disenfranchised people on the South Side. This fundamental class bias – this need to be, as the professional fundraisers say, “donor-friendly” – explains the most puzzling gaffe so far by the Obama Foundation: its failure to negotiate a community benefits agreement with local organizations, which would increase consultation with neighbors and ensure that at least some needs are met and some fears allayed. This is one of the project’s multiple ironies: that Barack Obama, the one-time South Side community organizer, is now thwarting a South Side community from empowering itself and taking part in decisions that will affect it for generations. No longer needing the community’s votes, Obama plays the paternalistic benefactor, giving the neighborhood what he and his rich friends and expert staff know it really needs, and who cares what the non-degreed riff-raff think.

If billionaires want to throw their money away on a gold-plated cultural non-asset like the Obama Presidential Center, who am I to say nay? It is, after all, a free country, especially for those who own it. But let the fat cats put the non-library where, if it can’t do actual good, it will at least do less harm. There are hundreds and thousands of empty lots on the South and West Sides of Chicago, places where construction of any kind would be a plus, bringing some measure of hope and attention to depleted and forgotten neighborhoods. Jackson Park is literally the worst possible location for job creation, despite the Foundation’s claims. There can be no spin-off construction on what technically remains public parkland, no next-door retail or restaurants or residences. Yes, there will be some jobs attached, but they will be classic examples of what author David Graeber terms “bullshit jobs,” PR and legal and security and administrative sinecures that are at best unnecessary and at worst pernicious and/or absurd: e.g., well-paid fundraisers raising funds to hire more fundraisers to raise more funds, ad infinitum. The Obama Foundation and other Establishment-blessed philanthropies of its type are expressly designed to manufacture a certain kind of liberal bullshit. By turning stark social and economic conflicts into fundable, non-threatening “programming,” they lubricate the squeaky gears of the social order rather than confronting its stubborn contradictions. The astronomical salaries paid to Obama Foundation leadership – in 2017, the executive director and CEO earned a combined $1.48 million – suggest that the organization is unlikely to pit itself against the capitalist inequities that shred the social fabric and are the bottom line in the South Side’s racialized poverty equation.

I earlier described the Obama Foundation’s Jackson Park follies as a Trojan horse, but perhaps Potemkin village is the better metaphor. The proposed complex is a spectacle that symbolizes community life and culture and memory and scholarship and public purpose without actually containing anything of historical value – just as the Obama administration symbolized progressive politics and racial advancement, concealing its chronic and self-neutering passivity, dead-centrist philosophy and unquestioned allegiance to the powers that be behind a façade of faux-populist rhetoric and wispy good intentions.

Chicago doesn’t need this hollow monument to gentrification, elitism and privatization on its lakefront. We as a nation don’t need more crumbs from the tables of the billionaires who choke and starve us, or more tainted foundation dollars turning angry activists into tame “social entrepreneurs.”

What we do need is tough, radical, grassroots democracy – which is to say, the community itself, and not self-appointed champions with their own agenda, taking on the strategic neglect and cancerous disinvestment that constitute slow-motion ethnic cleansing. In the unlikely event that Barack Obama really wants to make life better for all on the South Side of Chicago, he will need to come down from his sky-scraping glass and concrete fortress and join those on the ground, listening to what they say. If Obama could do that, which at this point he cannot, he might come to the sobering conclusion that his world is not their world, his friends are not their friends, and his hopes and dreams, as embodied in his fraudulent and destructive non-library, are built on their despair.

Hugh Iglarsh is a Chicago-based writer and editor who loves libraries and museums, but not fake ones. This essay began as a soapbox rant he gave at the annual Bughouse Square Debates, sponsored by the Newberry Library. He can be reached at hiiglarsh@hotmail.com.

Once again, the IEA is trying to stir things up re “fossil fuel subsidies”:

Worldwide fossil fuel consumption subsidies almost halved between 2012 and 2016, from a high point in 2012 of more than half a trillion dollars. But the estimate crept higher again in 2017, according to new data from World Energy Outlook 2018, and the run-up in the oil price in 2018 is putting pricing reforms under pressure in some countries.

The new data for 2017 show a 12% increase in the estimated value of these subsidies, to more than $300 billion. Most of the increase relates to oil products, reflecting the higher price for oil (which, if an artificially low end-user price remains the same, increases the estimated value of the subsidy). In 2016, for the first time, the value of subsidies to fossil-fuelled electricity were higher than for oil. The 2017 data sees oil return as the most heavily subsidised energy carrier.

Fossil fuel consumption subsidies are in place across a range of countries. These subsidies lower the price of fossil fuels, or of fossil-fuel based electricity, to end-consumers, often as a way of pursuing social policies including energy access.

There can be good reasons for governments to make energy more affordable, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable groups. But many subsidies are poorly targeted, disproportionally benefiting wealthier segments of the population that use much more of the subsidised fuel.

The period of high oil prices from 2010-2014 provided strong motivation for many oil-importing countries to pursue subsidy reform. The fall in price that began in 2014 presented the opportunity. A host of countries, from India to Indonesia and from Mexico to Malaysia, have implemented pricing reforms in recent years.

Every time a report like this comes out, Greenpeace and co leap up and down, pretending that taxpayers are actually handing money over to wicked oil companies.

In fact, as the IEA admit, these are “consumer subsidies”, and not “producer subsidies”. The latter are, of course, what we are paying to wind farms in this country, to enable them to compete with fossil fuels.

By contrast, consumer subsidies are given to keep prices down for the consumer, in this case energy, which may or may not come from fossil fuels.

The IEA explain their methodology below:

The IEA estimates subsidies to fossil fuels that are consumed directly by end-users or consumed as inputs to electricity generation. The price-gap approach, the most commonly applied methodology for quantifying consumption subsidies, is used for this analysis. It compares average end-user prices paid by consumers with reference prices that correspond to the full cost of supply. The price gap is the amount by which an end-use price falls short of the reference price and its existence indicates the presence of a subsidy.

My first reaction is just what the hell does any of this have to do with the IEA?

If, for instance, the Indian government wants to subsidise the price of electricity, so that its citizens are able to afford to run air conditioners, then that is up to them, and nobody else.

Similarly, if Iran wants to subsidise natural gas to enable its people to survive in winter, what right does the IEA to criticise?

The Report actually notes that such subsidies can be beneficial, but then ludicrously go on to complain that some richer people might benefit as well:

There can be good reasons for governments to make energy more affordable, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable groups. But many subsidies are poorly targeted, disproportionally benefiting wealthier segments of the population that use much more of the subsidised fuel.

In reality, energy taxes are one of the most regressive taxes of all. Removal of subsidies would have the same effect.

Subsidising energy for industry is also seen to be important by many countries, who would worry about the loss of competitiveness if they were withdrawn.

The IEA, of course, has ulterior motives, and could not give a toss about the wellbeing or livelihoods of ordinary people in developing nations, where all of the subsidies are concentrated. No EU country appears on the list, nor the US, Canada or Australia:

However, it no longer seems to care about energy security, fostering economic growth or eliminating energy poverty.

Instead, it appears to have an overarching remit to tackle climate change. If there was any doubt at all about this, check out Fatih Birol’s despair last week at the news that CO2 emissions were continuing to climb.

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By David Swanson | War is a Crime | March 8, 2015

If U.S. television and politicians started saying that Saudi Arabia should be bombed because it kills and tortures innocent people, within a week many millions of Americans would demand just that. And because those voices do say that about ISIS, many millions of Americans do favor a war on ISIS.

My point is not that bombs would be worse than the problem addressed and would make the problem itself worse as well, although that’s all true. Rather, my point is that most people who favor wars do so in order to blindly support a nation, and in blindly supporting that nation they allow it to dictate which wars they will favor. Although war supporters will give you reasons for the wars they favor, they actually favor whichever wars they are told to favor, and no others. And they’ll give you the reasons they are told to believe in as well.

More often than not, the U.S. public is advised to favor a war on a single individual of demonic nature, even though a war against an individual is completely nonsensical. … continue

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By Aletho News | January 9, 2012

This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue

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